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| Enjoying Idaho while ignoring Illinois |
Today is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice.
As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our positions at Illinois Tech after they declared "financial exigency" which allows them to eliminate tenured positions. I'll use this post to tell my story, but keep in mind there are 160 other ones.
The president announced that he would be asking the board to declare financial exigency in mid-July so we knew layoffs were coming but not when. On July 25th, we left for a planned 12-day vacation to Idaho. Why Idaho? It's my fiftieth state, so my wife and I decided to make a vacation of it. We saw Boise, canyons, craters, mountains, lakes. We were in Twin Falls three days before a mass shooting but that's a different story.
Usually I avoid reading work emails on vacation but decided I probably should this time. And on day four of vacation, I got an email invite to a meeting with the Vice-Provost of Faculty Affairs and an HR representative titled "Organizational Update" and I knew my fate was sealed. By the next day I was tired thinking about it and just decided to enjoy the rest of the vacation and deal with everything when I got back last Thursday. It might have been better if I simply didn't read email like usual.
It really hit me as I started to pack up my office Monday, for the first time with no office on the other side. Monday was also the first day of orientation week and a group of new students walked by as I was packing boxes into my car, though I don't think they noticed.
Illinois Tech got hit hard by a large drop in foreign graduate enrollment due to changing visa requirements, general anti-US sentiment, more opportunities in other countries and a weaker job market for graduating Masters students partly due to artificial intelligence. Universities face challenges beyond international students including Baumol's disease, administrative bloat to meet expanding regulations, the demographic cliff, reduced grant funding, and less support of universities by the public and both political parties, and AI changing how and why we teach. Illinois Tech is one of the first tech research schools to eliminate tenured roles, but it won't be the last.
I'll be okay but many of the other faculty could really use another position, in some cases so they can stay in the US. If you have opportunities for faculty in any discipline, let me know and I'll pass it along.
Not to make light of the precarious situation with higher-ed or employment opportunities...
ReplyDeleteAs can be inferred from the haze above the Idaho plains climate calamity is already at our doorsteps; AI is only making things worse than it already is; a few survivors will stare back aghast at the fiasco us humans have wrought on this planet.
https://apnews.com/article/hottest-month-july-climate-change-4a9d612281485356103631f0f09b61af
SolarUp - The vast majority of us, even those of us who know the climate is changing for the worst, will continue on as we always have. Meanwhile, the pot slowly picks up the boil. Such is the human tragedy.
Best of luck with your future! Relevant article: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-happens-to-college-towns-after
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of you and your colleagues. I'm used to seeing actions like this in corporate research environments, but it's a shock to see this in an academic institution, and I agree with your worry that this is a canary in the coal mine for academia and tenure. It certainly seems like a short-sighted move by Illinois Tech. Part of the argument for lower salaries in academia is the "security" of tenure. And despite the backlash, I believe that learning computer science and related fields will bring a huge benefit to students for the foreseeable future.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear about this, and hopefully you'll find a good position soon enough!
ReplyDeleteDo you think this could have realistically happen even in elite institutions like the ones you've been working at before, such as GTech, Northwestern and Chicago, or others like Stanford, Princeton, etc.?
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, engineering crown jewel of the nation, had three rounds of layoffs in '24/'25, reducing headcount by more than 1/3.
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